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Congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration are taking aim at a $42 billion infrastructure program launched in 2021 to bring high-speed internet to all Americans.
Republican critics say the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program from former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law has been slow to get “shovels into the ground.” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week said the program had too many “woke mandates” and announced a “rigorous review.”
Democrats, though, say a pause in the program will only further delay construction. More delays mean America’s least connected, least healthy counties will continue to wait for the high-speed internet needed to use telehealth, which is one of the few bipartisan solutions for rural health care shortages.
Here’s what our reporting found: Lots of people are waiting for high-speed internet. And that’s hurting them.
My colleague Holly K. Hacker mapped federal broadband data and, working with researchers from George Washington University, found that nearly 3 million people live in more than 200 mostly rural counties where in-person care is extremely limited and telehealth is largely out of reach.
Those “dead zone” counties are concentrated in regions often pinpointed for having inadequate services: Appalachia, the rural South, and the remote West. The analysis also showed that people who live in these counties tend to be sicker and die earlier than most other Americans.
Back in September 2020, I wrote an article about Trump’s first administration announcing a sweeping plan to transform health care in rural America. The word “telehealth” appeared in the plan more than 90 times. I wanted to understand whether telehealth could really help rural places, like where I grew up in Kansas.
In the coming months, we’ll take you to some dead zone counties to answer that question. The first feature, which published and aired this week, follows Barbara Williams, who lives in Greene County, Alabama, and is managing diabetes without a dependable internet connection.
That can mean “a huge difference in diabetes outcomes,” said Nestoras Mathioudakis, an endocrinologist and the co-medical director of Johns Hopkins Medicine Diabetes & Education Program.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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